It would just make it even more confusing. Right now if I want to speak to a business contact in, say, America, I have to find out their time zone, work out what time it is, and call them up. Under the new system, I would know that my contact in Los Angeles has the same time as me, but I wouldn't know what that actually means. It's currently 1pm here in the UK, but at 1pm in LA will they be in the office? Will they be on their way home from work? Will they be fast asleep?
Obviously, it would be possible to learn these things, but it's much harder to look up. Imagine a table of different countries, how do you define this stuff? Much easier to define what time the 24 hour day starts based on the sun than to define people's behaviour, as not everyone will have the exact same schedule for when they start work, when they wake up, etc.
I think in practice it would work pretty similar to how it does now. Companies would set their own time guidelines (ie. "Most of us arrive between 2200 and 2300, but just make sure you're here by 2315 every day")
For scheduling meetings with people globally, you'd have to figure out the day/night cycle but I doubt it would be all that much different than it is now.
But! There would be no goofy daylight savings time differences and there would be no ambiguity ("Oops, I thought the meeting was at 1pm my time, not yours...").
Plus, all us programmers could sleep peacefully at night knowing that our time-based code would just work, instead of waking in a cold sweat wondering what will happen when a government across the globe decides to erase the existence of a day.
If I want to ring a company in another country I would rather be able to make an educated guess that has a 99% chance of success, such as "they will be at work at 2pm in their timezone" than have to look up that company's guidelines..
Except your "educated guess" right now has a good chance of being wrong due to the complexity of computing what time in your timezone corresponds to 2 pm in theirs.
Even now, you need to be aware of cultural differences, as well as timezones.
Examples:
(for some definitions of here and there) It's 1300 here which means that it's 1700 there - do people tend to go home at 1700 or 1800?
Lunchtime in France is typically 1200-1400 (local), whereas in Israel it is 1400-1600. If I'm in France, and I need to call up my Israeli colleagues after lunch, simply adjusting for timezone won't do. If I call at 1430 Israeli time, they will have just gone out.
In these situations you currently have to know two things: what time it is over there, and what the cultural norms for work and mealtimes are. If time were internationally uniform, you'd only need the latter.
But it's certainly easier to guess right now. If I called and they were at lunch I would try again after the next hour clicks by, for example. And, in my experience, guessing at a 9-5 day has nearly always worked out for me, with just a few exceptions where I've learned of their slightly odd hours (and in my personal experience, all the people with odd hours are due to those people/companies, not the country they are in).
> In these situations you currently have to know two things: what time it is over there, and what the cultural norms for work and mealtimes are. If time were internationally uniform, you'd only need the latter.
For some time now I've included my time zone in the mouseprint of my email signature block; it'd be easy enough to include one's usual hours of availability as well.
It's currently 1pm here in the UK, but at 1pm in LA will they be in the office? Will they be on their way home from work? Will they be fast asleep?
With flexi-time and "24 hour working", that's becoming difficult with even the current system. I don't know the hours most of my contacts work but it frequently seems to be well into the small hours..
Obviously, it would be possible to learn these things, but it's much harder to look up. Imagine a table of different countries, how do you define this stuff? Much easier to define what time the 24 hour day starts based on the sun than to define people's behaviour, as not everyone will have the exact same schedule for when they start work, when they wake up, etc.